From the Flybridge - 6 September, 2015.pages

From the Flybridge - 6 September, 2015
There’s been a significant surge in game fishing activity this past week, with reports of plenty of
bait being worked by birds and tuna off Coffs Harbour, and along with that, the daily appearance of
striped marlin along the Solitary Coast. This will hopefully be the first in a series of incremental
upticks in big game action as we get further into the summer season, and so far, the timing is
excellent.
As reported last week, Black N Blue and Better than Vegas found both striped marlin and yellowfin
tuna in late August. The real trick at the moment seems to be finding striped marlin willing to bite
aggressively enough to get their jaws or bill in the way of a hook. Better than Vegas managed to
find one without any trouble at all last Sunday, but despite finding more stripes, Black N Blue is
having a battle with the hookup odds going completely against Rob and his crew right now. Like all
things, this will predictably change…
With water temperatures now regularly around 23C, the fishing simply has to get even better, and
anyone finding the sort
of 1-2C temperature
break that is still
showing up on the SST
satellite shots along the
bottom edge of the
shelf seems able to get
into areas holding
enough bait to have
YFT by the dozen in
attendance.
This past weekend,
there were about half a
dozen game boats out
over both days, and
once again, striped
marlin made it into the
wake behind Black N
Blue, but never hooked
up. However, there
were a lot of yellowfin
tuna, mainly feeding on
large schools of very
small baitfish, and while
it was hard to get their
attention, most boats
that saw YFT hooked at
least one. The photo on
the left is of a good
34kg yellowfin caught
by Gerard Billing fishing
with Rob Lang on BnB,
and was typical of the
other 20-35kg fish
boated on Saturday.
Gerrard Billing with his 34kg Yellowfin aboard Black N Blue on Saturday
On Sunday, Sultan Linjawi took Matador out for a run and once again, found huge quantities of
small bait with thousands of birds working it on the deep side of the shelf around the 500fa mark.
Sultan was chasing bigger stuff, running marlin lures looking for stripes, but angler Bob Coleman
hooked up a 35kg yellowfin nonetheless - that’s the sort of bycatch we all like to hear about.
Bob Coleman with his 35kg yellowfin caught fishing with Sultan Linjawi on Matator on Sunday
Sultan said there were literally “thousands” of YFT out there working this bait, and while he didn’t
bother to switch to small lures, he remarked that if you’d simply pulled up to one of the numerous
bait balls being worked by the tuna, stopped the boat and proceeded to cast poppers into the water
around the bait, you’d likely have had tuna hookups non-stop. Sultan also remarked on what a
sight it was cruising around in all this activity and watching big yellow sickles streaking through the
top of the waves.
This is exceptionally good news… the tuna Matador saw were all about the same size as those
caught earlier in the week and on Saturday, being from 20-35kg, and as long as this bait (small
unidentified stuff about 2 inches long, and there in tens of thousands) stays around, the tuna
fishing should be red hot for a while yet. Sultan was also marking a few large echoes under the bait
balls, but if they were marlin, they simply weren’t interested in what was going on on the surface.
Rob Lang made the wry observation after seeing this same sort of yellowfin action the day before
that the irony of it all was that the yellowfin were too big for the marlin to eat, and the bait was too
small for the marlin to bother with… so while all hell’s breaking loose with the smaller pelagics like
the yellowfin, there’s not enough other stuff around to get the striped marlin worked up. That’s got
to happen soon though, as this small bait will have to bring in a pile of striped tuna and small
dollies, and then once that happens, the marlin are likely to go nuts.
One of the discussions I had this week was with a game fisherman who also happens to be a
physicist and fishes for Atlantic bluefin. His interest at the moment is all about drag settings, and
the effect of decreasing effective spool diameter on drag as a fish strips line off a reel. As noted in
the existing article about drag on this website, for a constant drag lever position, the drag exerted
by a reel’s drag system steadily increases as the diameter of the spool decreases.
In very broad terms, if you set a strike drag off 33% on a full spool of line, without changing the
position of the drag lever, that drag will have increased to about 50% of breaking strain after half
the spool of line has been taken by a fish, and as you get down to the last few metres of line left on
the spool, the drag will have increased to about 95% of the breaking strain - the real danger zone
for the inexperienced angler. Of course, with an older reel and the older basic friction plate drag
systems, this isn’t particularly reliable, because unlike the newer hydrothermal drags, the old gear
can start to lose or increase drag as soon as it starts to overheat, and consequently, you can’t be
sure of what’s really happening as the fish gets down into the bottom half of the spool.
When working with the old drags, anglers had to back off the drag as the spool got lower and the
drag overheated, although that isn’t necessarily true of contemporary drag systems like those on
current model Tiagras and Penn VSWs. Still, you can never be sure…
One highly respected
Italian reel that has been
on the market since 1958
is the Everol brand.
Everol has been
specialising in game reels
engineered and built for
catching Atlantic and
Mediterranean bluefin
tuna, and given how well
the average Ferrari is put
together in the same
country of origin, it’s not
unreasonable to describe
the Everol reels as being
the Ferraris of the game
fishing business.
An 80lb Everol reel showing the unique drag adjustment system that is a big feature of these top Italian reels
Interestingly, Everol hasn’t changed its basic design for decades, and while other reel
manufacturers will argue that the Italians haven’t kept up with technology, it’s not hard to believe
that they were using pretty advanced technology from the start, so maybe they aren’t really behind
at all. Furthermore, as the Everol people would probably agree, if you’ve designed a perfect
machine, why change it when there’s no need to…?
The Everol drag system was designed to be self cooling, using built-in finned marine grade
stainless cooling elements that fan cool air over high temperature carbon fibre drag plates. In
addition to the unique drag and cooling system, one of the standout features of all the Everol reels
is a special drag calibration system that allows anglers to adjust drag during a fight to ensure that
the reel is always exerting exactly the same drag regardless of whether the reel is full, or down to
its last 100m of line.
Similarly, if an angler does decide to vary the drag during a fight, even if the desire is to increase
the drag to overcome a fish that’s got you in a stalemate, at least the Everol system allows you to
adjust to a precise level, rather than an educated guess.
No doubt this is a patent protected system. And even if you don’t subscribe to using it to back off or
increase the drag accurately during a fight, it sure is nice to be able to consult the scale on the reel
to give yourself an idea of just what drag you’re fighting with at any given time with a constant lever
position.
As I mentioned earlier, you can argue both ways on this feature. Many anglers will still want to back
off the drag when the spool diameter decreases as a fish on a big run strips line, but on the other
hand, some skippers prefer to see the drag lever stay on the strike setting throughout a fight, so
that as a particularly aggressive fish strips line, the drag increases proportionally, providing greater
control over a fish threatening to spool the angler.
Regardless, there’s little doubt that circumstances may require a combination of both drag
techniques at different times, but before deciding what to do under different fight conditions, you
can’t really make a decision until you’re thoroughly familiar with the effect you’re having by
changing the drag lever or by leaving it set.
While most of us have known about Everol reels for years, I must admit to never having seen or
used one, although a good friend of mine from the Pensacola Game Fishing Club on the US east
coast is a true believer, and needless to say, many of the blokes fishing in the Mediterranean
swear by them.
Given the usual behaviour of a big tuna during a fight, where the fish generally goes deep and
applies constant pressure once it tires, I can see a strong case for being able to accurately
increase drag at any time during a fight with any tuna over about 75kg or so - at any spool level so that between the angler and the skipper, the angle on the fish can be changed to help plane it
up while knowing exactly what pressure you’re exerting on fish and line.
Conversely, when fighting marlin, their unpredictable behaviour and proclivity to suddenly come up
and have a tantrum on the surface halfway through a fight would mean to me that I’d be a little
more circumspect about getting too fancy with drag changes unless I was working with a highly
experienced angler on the rod.
In closing… it’s probably too early to start talking about next weekend, but with water temperatures
already heading north of 22C off Coffs, and a particularly appealing forecast for Saturday, it’s all
got a feel more like late September/early October to it.
Here’s hoping the game fish are getting the same feeling…
Rick O’Ferrall - www.fromtheflybridge.com